[A fine evening of it was had by Marko, Labrosse and
me, Moonface on the Nikas floor in an upbeat mood. She was
finding her clients exemplary; how it was they were contentedly dining
and enjoying ambiance. Animal House Table chatter was verging on the
sublime, Marko keen to pick my brains for what he ought to read so
as to improve himself as a novelist. What ancients should he read
in particular? (Herr Professor within me fluttered.) I responded that,
if Marko was reading Montaigne, he was already doing pretty well;
and that, given his Serbo-Croat background, he might consider reading
himself a good history of the Byzantine realm, Norwich’s book,
for instance; or he might have a go at a primary source like Michael
Psellus, Marko half monk, half voluptuary in his mental make-up. At
one point, Labrosse astonished me, his visage quite ruddy from the
wine, his grin altered by a missing tooth that had lost a battle with
a tough almond, Labrosse saying that Marko should get used to the
idea that he would see civic turbulence in his time, even in Canada.
Had wine gotten the better of Labrosse’s intellectuals? At another
point there I was going on about Italy – Venice, Rome and Naples
in particular, even Palermo; Marko intending an Italian junket; and
I am afraid I got quite nostalgic for my various sojourns there; just
that Italy would survive this silliness on my part. And here was Moonface
gadding about in her lime-green sneakers, tippy-toeing at each of
her tables, hands behind her back, seeing how things stood; and she
was happy. She was happy when, at the end of her shift, she joined
us and we all of us repaired to ‘bratwurst’ for nightcaps;
and we joshed her, and she was tickled to be joshed. But when she
and Labrosse went out for cigarettes, Marko said to me: “Do
you know what I think about Moonface? And, by the way, she does have
a sort of Moonface face, I can see it, she has this ridiculous idea
that men are attracted to her.” I answered, “Well, are
you going to disabuse her with the brutal truth?” Marko said,
“Never.” He added that Moonface was not unintelligent
and she was pleasant company. “Good,” I said. I kept to
myself the fact that I figured Moonface needed male worship, what
with her troubled upbringing; just that she was also very greedy and
did not always hold up her end of a conversation. She and Labrosse
returned, Labrosse reported that the reason Annette does not ‘read’
is that Annette considers reading too slow in respect to how fast
her brain works. I must have serious words with the wench. One can
imagine Lunar chiming in: “Words? Only words?”]

Maz Bar—That that night and that venue
for end-of-the-worlders, so far as ‘Maz’ pertains to these
writings, is not so much a matter of a failed metaphor but that I
did not pursue it as metaphor aggressively enough. I have not quite
made of Labrosse, Moonface and Annette ciphers not only of the life
of the mind but of what some have been pleased to call ‘interiority’,
and were perhaps overplaying a hand, modernism apparently defunct.
Still, after a fashion, there is a quantifiable geist out there insofar
as it smacks of the public realm and its climate of general and amorphous
discontent overlaying all sorts of less visible but deeply palpable
nastiness. Did I not write – either in the novel or in Lunar
Encore – that Moonface is both a pinup girl for Latin studies
and for the Virgilian as applied to the American imperium and its
need to get the scratch to maintain those 789 legion forts worldwide?
Annette, a shepherdess, too, has come late to the party; and I believe
she does have an iota of an inkling as to what the party has been
about and where it might be headed, this knowing over and above the
antics the wine cow tends to inspire – her pretend marriage
to Labrosse a for instance. Just that, being fairly sound but infinitely
lazy of mind, I have not attempted to acquaint Annette with too many
current events as it would only render her deep-set lanterns of the
soul overly glassy; make her well and truly glassy-eyed. The night
she sang Black Velvet to scag-addled mentalities (whatever
the scag of choice) at Maz Bar, we were simply following some Arcadian
creek whichever course it took between its grass-clad banks of gambolling
nymphs and truckers; and if, as she sang, I ‘saw’ the
future, I saw I could not express it; and if I saw myself for what
I am yet – a creature still of lust-love with a poet’s
antsiness in respect to life’s transience – I saw that
I am pretty well written in stone. All this in a corner of the world
that has seen better days; and if the 21st century was to be Canada’s,
well, maybe in the 22nd Montreal will regain its old savoir faire.
Apart from parts of the canon, the writing that most permeated my
brain in my youth, a few passages’ worth, was that of Proust
depicting Charlus as taking his pleasure while the bombs were falling
on Paris, WWI; and something in me observed that, in one way or another,
I would see this, too – a great falling apart of things, however
much we might or might not muddle through, a girl like Annette in
her in-between hours of the baby fat she will soon enough leave behind
and the fears she may never shake.

Old Pages

I opened the book and with astonishing certainty I
knew at that moment that I was only the person anywhere in the world
about to nose into Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s The Romance of
Leonardo da Vinci, a monumental historical novel. I sneezed.
The first few pages seemed devoted to 15th century Tuscan turf excavations,
the hunt on for long-buried marble Aphrodites. Classical ground. I
sneezed again. [A bit of research – Wikipedia – incoherent
contribution: but that Merezhkovsky was
a classicist – religious anarchist – ‘God-admirer’
and so, as such, an object of scorn – would the Russia of Dostoyevsky
extend a hand to the France of Pascal? – was misunderstood,
and what man isn’t? – was sceptical of the Bolshies, the
communists even if they weren’t all power-trippers – the
3rd Testament or a religion of the Holy Ghost? – to discover
a tempting vice in the greatest of virtues and the greatest of virtues
in the tempting vice – Legacy: nine times nominated for the
Nobel? –just a boring writer who made a lot of noise –
Fawcett would’ve dissed him, as did Trotsky—] I
have been talking my folly for some time now: the novel, Lunar
Encore, and Our Night at Maz Bar; and I can only conclude,
all considerations of insufficient data aside, that the moments such
as we live to varying degrees of intensity can only be imperfectly
rendered by way of language, if not mutilated; and the moments that,
in their aggregate, redound to a geist, and for all that the geist
generates commentary – the George W Bush years for example –
are but so many scarlet pimpernels. So why bother? Because writing
is a habit. And because, well, one was angry, enraged. One was going
to get on one’s hobby-horse and demonstrate that one would not
be juggernauted by all that ‘mission accomplished’ malarkey
as it pertained to bottomless war and perpetual wealth-transfer. And
perhaps, due to ego, all one succeeded in demonstrating is that one
had gotten one’s proverbial knickers in a twist. Even so, the
moment, the geist, it has as much to do with the way the new waitress
(she is not so new now) moves about Nikas as it does with how the
sight of Bush’s mug and the sound of his voice curdled the blood;
how a poem might fail this time around as opposed to the failure that
was in hock to the Reagan years; and yes, what’s with the leather
armband on Steff’s wrist – it looks like something some
falconer-crackhead might wear? The quality of light on a drear November
morning. Outside, it pours. I have not seen Labrosse, Moonface and
Annette in a while. Will their faces in time just fade from my view?
I have not been availing myself of the wine cow. Have not had a cigarette
in seven months apart from the odd puff. I do not believe that, for
all that we know, we do not really know why the Germans of the 30s
went so bizarre, surreal and worse; just as it seems now that whatever
it was it is has been sweeping across the what me worry faces of Americans
for quite a while—

More Swimmingly

Mr Carpenter, Prominent Political Commentator, has
been tying himself up in verbal pretzels, defending rationality and
Mr Obama against defeatist progressives. Drawing up beside his chariot
in a race out of Ben-Hur, Mr Hedges in his chariot continues to rail
against liberals for their sell-out that has been nothing recent;
and Hedges, applying the whip, calls for civil disobedience, if only
for its own sake, the President beside the point. Lunar, I should
imagine, has nothing to say for all this, he intending to take in
Cilea’s Adrianna Lecouverer at the opera, this evening,
London time. Opera aside, the one thing one can say for Lunar is that
he never climbs aboard bandwagons, no, not ever, as he is half Polish
and wholly obtuse; and if in some village in Poland the villagers
have erected the world’s tallest statue of Christ made of fibreglass,
well, there you go – mulishness; and I find it grotesque –
not the Christ-worship but the kitsching-up. As for Xerxes, his forces
put into disarray by uncouth Greeks, he went and lusted after his
brother’s wife, as if lust will follow defeat more swimmingly
in a chain of cause and effect and harem intrigue; and then,
he goes and lusts after the daughter of said brother and wife; and
it comes to no good end – it comes to a very bad end for the
brother and brother’s wife. One wonders – though modern
scholars will argue it, this, that and the other thing – if
Xerxes was one of those half-competent twits who seem so much more
lethal than full-out twits; but whose outsized ego and vainglory more
or less subsumes the competent part. My own view of historical forces
lines up more with Thucydides and Tacitus, but there is in Herodotus
a dark enough spectacle, if one about which the summing up bears some
affinity with Robert Duvall’s graveside perorations in the epic
western Broken Trails, to wit: from the sweet grass to
the packinghouse. Kind of chillingly poetic, this characterization
of life’s, any life’s, course. Yes, and Duvall was about
as Nestorian as any American can ever get.

Violence on the #105

A young man offers me violence on the #105. He would
just as soon slit my throat as order out for a pizza. I look into
his eyes, into tunnels at which ends there is no possibility of light.
Downtown, I meet up with Cowles. Cowles is in a mood. And over the
course of lunch at the old-fashioned diner on St Catherine’s
and over beers at Ziggy’s, he tells me that happy days are finished
for NYC. He has been spending a great deal of time there over the
past year or so in the hopes of expanding his client-base for the
fine-art photographs he has to sell. Gradually, his discourse gathers
steam and gets more rapid fire – “Culture is passive
– it can’t defend itself – who do you think educated
Cleopatra? – why, the slaves – artists are slaves –
the system collapses, the gangsters take over – casino capitalism
– Obama is toast – he had a window of opportunity, he’s
a footnote in history – nice man, smart, but – no one
in NYC mentions his name in polite company – everyone’s
in despair – after the collapse, well? – but it’s
coming, you know, and you know it is, and everyone down there senses
it – what happened in Germany? – Germany was civilization
once upon a time – nothing else in Europe is working except
for Germany where they’ve been through so much s—t they’re
not going to put up with neo-nazis, unlike the Dutch or Belgians –
those guys that just walked into the bar, they look like skinheads
with baseball caps, only it’s hockey – anyway –
Germany, what happened there was that the gangsters took over and
got political – I mean, what was he thinking, that he was going
to extend the hand of friendship to the people who destroyed the country,
I mean, Jesus – there’s lots of rich people with stinking
amounts of money who spend it on trash – New York? – it’s
basically falling apart – no, Letterman’s not New York,
he’s the tourist trade – those guys look like they want
to wipe the floor with us, we don’t look like jocks, well maybe
you do – no, it’s finished – what’s left to
argue? – well, how’s it going to pan out? – where’s
it happening in the world? – China, India, Germany – forget
the US – when the Chinese figure the Americans have become a
liability rather than an asset they own, then look out –“
Cowles is on a roll but the decibels in the bar are incrementally
rising and drowning him—

True Civility

Via Labrosse and Jamal, from Mehdi the long haul trucker,
a cd of lovely Persian music. A collection of what I understand to
be folk melodies collected under the rubric of Those Days
that perhaps hearken back to better times. Piano and violin. And on
one track something like an harmonium, one of those instruments that
wheezes air. I see that in my notes I have attempted a description
of what evil is, as when grand temperaments behave shabbily; otherwise,
shabby is as shabby does. Orson Welles’ portrayal of the corrupt
sheriff in A Touch of Evil? Fawcett once held that there
is no such thing as evil; there is only dysfunction. What he thinks
now I have no idea, but I might ask, that is, when I am up to risking
his scorn. I napped through the one o’clock hour and have come
down to Nikas late, Alexandra on the floor. She and I share
no secrets, but now and then I get a look from her which suggests
we do. Perhaps with the exception of family and close friends, I have
some notion of the extent of her grief; and that little smile of hers
– once a much bigger smile – is her recognition that I
do, indeed, understand. A note from Amanda J acknowledging my ‘wonderful
letter’, and she will reciprocate in due course. Lunar will
be jealous. He, I think, at noon London time, had tea with the ‘CHC’,
the Canadian High Commissioner at Grosvenor Square. Evil? Evil is
that which makes us sometimes bombastic and self-righteous and morally
ascendant as when we would keep track of incidents of torture, for
instance, and the ways and means by which the one per centers transfer
wealth to themselves in ever increasing amounts. Or does any of the
above in any way shape or form signify not evil so much as a slippage
of gears? I see in myself a kind of Elmer Fudd sputtering with indignation.
Oh dear, but here is the Hockey Groupie who has been a bane to Animal
House Table, especially when Eggy was still with us. She is no doubt
as kindly as she seems to be, she apparently a nurse. But she has
the personality of what, I can’t say, just that she’s
a loon who, once given her inch has her mile-wide smile. It is
quite possible that she is entirely unaware how lonely she is and
how unloved, for all that that smile beggars her countenance. I will
have to exchange civilities with her as I cannot avoid passing by
her table—Ah, there it is, the word I had in mind earlier, today,
for reasons that have escaped me now. I should think that true civility
does not preclude incidents of mirthful tease, even a bit of roughhouse
between strangers who recognize that they will have much to do with
each other eventually. That other civility that has more to do with
ritualized prostrations is simply a method for sterilizing the passage
of time.

Economies of Motion

In the endless dream-novel of my sleeping hours (what
else can I call it but that – this perpetual saga?) a voice
comes to the fore; a voice that has not completely lost all self-respect
but is on the verge. It says, “It’s been a long while
since I’ve known love.” Immediately, a countering voice,
one irked beyond all reasonable bounds – beyond belief, as we
used to say – snarks, “Love? You were loved as recently
as last night. Why so greedy? What’s with you hosers? This never-ending
puling about love. I never—“ The presidency appears to
be in a shambles, the administration seemingly lurching from one walk-back
utterance to the next; and still, President the 44th would double-down
on his penchant for bipartisan acts of legislation, and wisdom suffuse
the land and moderation carry the day. Does the condition of mind
of a Maimed King become our minds, too, all that breathes and locomotes
infected, even the cinder blocks of construction sites? One answers,
of course, in the negative, seeing as most people pay no notice and
schlep along on their treadmills; and some are darlings and some are
sweethearts, even as Irish harpy and retinue decidedly are not.
Nikas. Morning. And they have hunkered down – harpy, husband,
noodge son – as ever; and already they are deep in it, whinge-ing
and complaining and backhanding unseeable go-between spirits (such
as cause the gods to sigh, such as plague our souls) into submission.
I do not know what binds these three individuals, these magi of a
kind, and it might be love or a stickier sort of familial glue. Mutual
loathing? Still, Irish harpy has her moments of break-through counter-intuitives,
as when she reports that cancer rates have only increased since the
hour when ashtrays disappeared from elevators. Well, is she right?
Is she on to something? Steff is our waitress of the moment,
she a grinning Cinderella staring at the outer edges of grim middle-age,
she thirty-seven. And tall in stature, she is wearing a skirt and
black leggings; and she is not unwilling to please and meet a soul
half ways just so long as it does not, on her part, necessitate extravagant
outlays of energy. Which puts me in mind of a woman I once lived with
about whom a friend remarked that she had a profound sense of the
economy of motion, she being a soft-spoken southerner of languid manner.
In fact we were man and wife, I four years her junior at age seventeen;
and she went about without undue fuss even if she was deeply panicked
in some existential sense and social justice burned red hot in her.
It was inevitable that we would part ways sooner or later; and we
did, and it was an amiable parting, almost business-like. I have no
idea if she ever had anything like a well-being that took in her soul
– I was witness to some of her attempts at procuring happiness
– but she would have deserved it. She would have loved this
president had she lived, he her kind of man. Bookish, athletic, courtly
style.

Martinis and Sergeant Major

There is sentiment in a sentence of Herodotus which
states how a certain point on the Greek mainland was the closest the
Persian army got to the setting sun. One can imagine Patrick O’Brian
having written it. Otherwise, yes, it goes hard on morale to have
knowledge and yet lack the power to act, and one is dashed. Annette
phoned, last evening. Labrosse clearing his throat in the background,
Annette’s voice tumbled through however it is a signal gets
transported, these days; hers the invitation that Harman and I should
step over and play cards at her place. Harman declined. But I was
to go and play with my little friends, even so. Whereupon, at Annette’s,
Labrosse poured me out an immense martini which he said would challenge
the workings of my tongue in due course. Instead, the effect of the
potion was to sufficiently clear my brain of unimportant thoughts
and I was thereby able to crush my opponents in a game of 8-5-3 or
Sergeant Major. For all that, I put it to Labrosse that it has been
reported – though not substantiated – that the head of
the French nation-state is cosying up to the head of the Israeli state,
so much so he is making a benefice of war planes and perhaps other
items, Netanyahu tickled. Labrosse nodded as if to say that no such
tidings could surprise him. Other tidings have it that the American
Secretary of State is kicking in war planes, too, as a sweetener,
her objective being a settlement freeze, peace talks pending. French
head of state just deposed his defence minister in favour of a more
conservative cabinet member—Stars wheel about the sky, honouring
the fact that life goes on, Annette a chubby seraphim with a punk-blonde
hairstyle and stunning deep-set eyes. Her digs have the touching air
of the young in search of identity. So years fell away as I sat there,
drank, shuffled and dealed cards; arranged hands in their suits; laid
down my winners without too much the extravagant manner of a Xerxes;
offered up my sacrificial victims so as to pursue broader strategies,
Annette and Labrosse both nimble-minded players. They had spent the
day shopping and confusing people with their pretend marriage. Moreover,
at a certain venue, staff got to thinking that one or the other of
them was famous; management was summoned, and Labrosse was duly serviced,
and then he spilled it that he was but Annette’s elderly chauffeur
who nonetheless required two pair of jeans, as he is always elegantly
coiffed and attired. Elsewhere they were alternately man and wife
and father and daughter and Bonnie and Clyde. The years fell away.
Annette glowed. Labrosse had the look of a man who was happy enough
to have completed a marathon, never mind winning it. There impinged
on my mental processes the memory of a time when I and a friend –
in his first Seattle digs – would drink gin, play cards, listen
to Ian and Sylvia (country music duo, Albertans, I think); then Holst’s
The Planets, then the Cream. With any luck, this friend would
fry up some potatoes, bacon and eggs. Let the good times roll. A regular
symposium of two. Earlier in the evening, before Annette’s call,
I received a call from Young Master, the import of which I will discuss
at a later time. Again, Mr Obama as Maimed King? What of Hedges and
his contempt of liberals and obsequious academics who have had a hand
in stilling the life of the mind and dissenting opinion, the McCarthy
days the prototype for this sort of behaviour? What of Mr Carpenter,
Prominent Political Commentator, centrist in his defence of the President
who is all we have got between us and a nasty, nasty bunch of cretins?
In this the magical martini was not much help. Head goes one way,
heart the other. I am a liberal temperament who also holds liberals
in contempt for their sell-out to lifestyle and art as therapy. “What’s
Maz?” Harman asked me, yesterday. I answered that it was a bar
down the street of manic-depressives and embittered sorts, neglecting
to add that it is also a state of mind; one that we might have to
endure if not embrace, no place else to run to, nowhere to hide and
all that.

More Beer, More Sausages

They were talking Schopenhauer at the adjoining table
in ‘bratwurst’, last night; that trio consisting of a professorial-looking
chap approaching middle age and two young minxes, his ‘students’.
The women had exotically tinted hair; they had pleasant visages; just
that it was impossible to determine, by their demeanours, whether they
were whistling dixie or had real knowledge in respect to the subject
of their discourse. The one with the lavender tresses was ludicrously,
because ever so sombrely, holding forth on the Schopenhauerian ‘mind-set’,
and I wanted to bellow or belch – as in garrrp: “Beer
and sausages, girl, that’s all. Beer and sausages and time to
kill and a somewhat melancholic disposition, one that generally indicates
higher than average intelligence.” But I bit my tongue and swallowed
the gas. We were drinking chilled Bitburger, Labrosse, Moonface and
I, Moonface perpetually running her hand through her hair. The clocks
had recently been set back. It was a time when suicide rates spike.
Earlier, Harman and I listened to a lecture given by Bill Moyers on
a Boston campus just before the midterm election; we got blue and more
blue as we listened. There was no need for me to say, “See, it’s
what I’ve been saying all along,” my voice rising to some
wounded pitch, I one of the countless numbers of the long-suffering.
My silence told all. It was web cast, this lecture, and Moyers was no
great shakes as a speaker, this man who served the offices of Kennedy
and LBJ and did God knows else; who came to have his own show on TV;
who has done a little preaching; who was St Paul-like, extolling the
writings of Howard Zinn the historian; this man who knows nothing about
poetry and less about art but who was intimating that the crunch had
arrived. In any case, something like a whale in me surfaced and rolled
over and I was restless with unwanted despair; and restless, I kissed
Harman and said I was going out, and if she wished to join me she knew
where she could find me; and she, sensing my true state of mind, passed
on the invitation; her attention devoted to the Q & A that was following
upon the lecture. At ‘bratwurst’ Labrosse and I immediately
fell to debating the business world, something I know nothing about
and he does, as he used to whiz about on corporate jets. Moonface rolled
her eyes. Sibum: “There’s more than one business world;
and there is that business world, the most esoteric of them, that owns
the senate down there, for instance.” Labrosse, gravely: “Yes,
that’s true, but even so, you’re wrong. There’s only
one business world, and all it wants from government are clear rulings
as to how it’s to conduct itself in making a buck.” Moonface
rolled her eyes some more, the structure of her face a conundrum as
it’s long and narrow, and it ought to make her look shrewish –
like the Wicked Witch of the West, pointy chin and all that; and it
does not. I shrugged some more, full of the absurdity of myself. It
was a feckless argument in which Labrosse and I were good-naturedly
engaged; but that it would go nowhere. And now it was even more feckless
as Labrosse suggested that, given the economic realities to the south,
Ottawa – despite the rightwing tinge of its sitting government
– must be getting increasingly nervous as it is primed for a squeeze,
the Americans doing it dirty. It was only too probable, I supposed.
Moonface, grinning, up stretched her arms, and made a show of her charms.
She was going to become a translator, come hell or high water, French
to English and back again. For a moment, however, we alighted on Chaucer,
and she said, exuding pleasure, “A Parliament of Fowls”;
and I swatted the shuttlecock back with, “A Parliament of Birds”;
and hers was the Valentine, mine the mere stab at Sufi mysticism. Now
Jamal the proprietor was playing Iranian music videos on the ‘bratwurst’
TV. Labrosse turned around in his chair to look, and he said, bizarrely
enough, in a rather poorly thought-through attempt at humour: “Women
like that, you know, and they get their lips cut – with razors
over there.” “No,” said Moonface, her tone a truly
curious admixture of being tickled and getting alarmed. Jamal only laughed
and waved his arm at us no-nothings and said he would look up the truth
of the assertion on the internet. Labrosse was more or less stopped
in his verbal tracks, shoulders hunched, his sixty-eight year old lips
gone disconcertingly slack. By then the table of Schopenhauerian aficionados
had departed, sensing perhaps that our table was consecrated to barbarism.
Now I write these words down, morning in Nikas. Only that Bilko
has entered and is in fine form, hooting and whistling and stamping
his feet and flinging his arms about, disturbing my peace, Bilko the
ex-Israeli fighter pilot. Larry the software entrepreneur, spotting
my displeasure, amused, motions me over to his table in the front dining
area of the restaurant. We fall to talking, fellow stragglers on the
long path of life, one crowded with pilgrims whose behaviours are beyond
our control, you gotta love ‘em. No, I do not know much
about Bilko’s life. That he was an ex-fighter pilot could be pure
supposition. The rumour of it has just stuck to him somehow. Alexandra
is feeling quite poorly due to the death of her father. Steff the new
waitress, filling in for Alexandra, today, is somewhat of a flake, especially
as suddenly she crows how much she likes greyhounds; and out she goes
to the street where there is a greyhound on a leash waiting to be petted.
Yes, those of us who regard ourselves as sane are only the more mad
for thinking it. There we were, last evening, Labrosse, Moonface and
I out on the ‘bratwurst’ terrasse in the wintry rain, those
two having their smoke break, I having a single puff for I have otherwise
quit; and though I dislike the sound of the words for their being somewhat
cold and Bauhaus-ian, I reckoned that there was such a thing as the
architecture of desire; that the eyes do the building; and I spoke to
Moonface about her Marilyn Monroe eyes, and Labrosse guffawed and she
bellied up some burbling laughter, pleasantly irked to hear it; and
I was happy enough to have got it said; enough said; and I buggered
off, went home. Letterman was inane.

The Maimed King

Alexandra, Nikas
waitress, wife to Mike who sold his share of the restaurant to Eddie,
is going about the place with no cosmetics, a face down to her knees.
Such newly-incurred pallor. Her eyes seemed to have moved closer together,
as if to unmistakably express inconsolable grief, their colour washed
out. She is just back from Greece where she helped bury her father.
Relentless sorrow all too evident in her demeanor, it could be that
what is sinking in, apart from her father’s death, is the fact
of her having returned to Canada, a country with which some portion
of her being is perpetually at odds, if only for reasons of climate.
It is morning, a few customers wondering what they have done to deserve
Alexandra’s disinterest in them. Otherwise I recently dreamed
the following words: love was the dream,
reality the crucifixion. We will always choose the dream, always and
every time. It is what makes us human and so cruel. And when earth is
more than earth; a stone more than just a bit of rock; and a tear-stained
cheek—Perhaps someone or something is to be praised that
the dream ended when it did, dream-drivel in the offing. Harman and
I went out to the cabin for an over-nighter, the sky grey, the creek
running high. Full-throated water flashing white over black, mossy rock—(Alexandra’s
mood is worsening, an air of menace to her, a shiver in the heels of
her feet, as if she intends to pounce—)And yes, what about those
Patrick O’Brian novels? Isn’t imperialism of the British
variety such good, clean, healthy, wholesome, high-spirited fun?
And yet the man writes excellent sentences; and every once in a while,
a pairing of them undercuts the exercise, and imperialism is suddenly
a shabby, filthy, bloody, futile enterprise. And then it is another
hundred pages or so of sea-ramble, and sharp’s the word and
quick’s the action (do I have that right?) until the next
summing up. In any case, Harman and I holed up for an evening and a
night, and then in the morning, the dying language of liberal radio;
and then it was lunch in North Hatley with Crow and Charlotte, the leaves
all blown away from the trees. An hilarious story of a nearby neighbour’s
sexual antics on the verandah, the woman declaring to all the world
the affliction one must endure when the male has ‘come’
too fast; and one might have thought that he at his age, divorces and
a stroke under his belt, should have gotten the hang of it by now. It
hit me just then that I might address a poem to the so-called mask of
Agamemnon, the one Schliemann dug up. Current President as Maimed
King as per the Authurian legend – any takers? It is a thought
that nags. Saw Labrosse briefly, last evening in Nikas; and
we were joined by Annette in punk-blonde mode. Were she and I at sixes
and nines? “No,” she answered, “of course not,”
she astounded to hear of it. But I did not think she was so astounded
as that whereas Labrosse the fox merely looked innocent. I pleaded that
I could not hang about with them and get drunk, however appealing the
option. Now here are Irish harpy and husband. It does not take her long.
Irish harpy, ever the busy-body, has drawn it out of grim Alexandra.
How her father had a heart attack, eating and drinking, being so alive—

Creation Myths

November, so
Harman and I have decided, is the dreariest month on the Montreal dance
card. The sun seems to throw in the towel; winter will not be cheated
of its innings. In the meantime, chill rain. Otherwise, here is a question
that so far seems to have defeated the best minds of a generation: why
is it that so many Canadian films are invariably stocked with creepy
characters of all genders, the female gender typified by empowerment
gone bad, no new wrinkles in the abominable male? I am fairly certain
that some prescient beaver must have held his or her nose at the first
encroachments of the colonists; but that original sin did not really
take here until narratives were wanted for the passing of long winter
nights. The first poet to have received a Governor-General’s award?
The answer to this query seems shrouded in the mists of history, just
as it is not clear whether Noah was a mere social drinker or a truly
committed boozehound. I adjust, I suppose, to new levels of awfulness
south of here; just that Crow, from his deep country nest in the Townships,
enjoins me to write savage satire. And I might, seeing as by now –
over the course of the past ten to twelve years – satire has gotten
to be the first breath I draw when I pop open my eyes in the morning,
and I am much too old for this sort of thing who used to be a lyric
poet. Two days in a row, and in Nikas, Steff the new waitress
has on a skirt. Harman is contemplating a return to skirts; was at it
all day yesterday, putting in time at the sewing machine. What gives
with women? Lunar worries that the prose of George W Bush’s soon
to be released memoir will exceed his own in excellence. Silly Lunar.
If the former president worried that the White House had been under
the chemical-biological gun, cataclysm’s clock ticking away, Lunar
has worried the fate of civilization itself, his Dick Tracy two-way
all static, atmospheric disturbance. Or has anyone noticed that Lunar
cares? He has been invited to partake of tea and perhaps some other
stimulant with the Canadian High Commissioner in London. Well, half
the sentence above is accurate. I leave it to you to determine which
half. Sibum quoting Sibum: But I must say
I never/Went to bed with Maggs, her eyes a lovely blue./She was ravishing
in her gown/The night she came to speak her mind./’Who’s
Aristotle?’ she asked/And asked for what was in the bottle.
Now perhaps only his hairdresser knows for sure what sort of man Current
President is, but one thing is apparent to me: he has a hero-complex
that just might deepen into something more problematic that we hold
in association with crucifixions. It is to say that for all his vaunted
pragmatism and his love of wielding power, he wishes to be remembered
to posterity as one who defied the odds, seriously steep odds, he having
rescued the country from the worse, most scrofulous angels of its nature.
What is troubling in respect to this analysis is that here we have an
instance of a man prone to outsmarting himself; that this is a man of
abundant natural talent – he can write and shoot jumpshots and
seemingly whip off a few foxtrots at the ball – who nonetheless
will hector himself at every turn to focus, focus, focus. This inward
nagging is commonplace among athletes who always seem promising and
who perform erratically, now absolutely brilliant, now a complete duffer.
I am myself a writer who was once in possession of a lethal jumpshot,
and I can see the pathology in the man’s jaunty gait, one that
does not easily register tsunamis. He will be the last to know, the
last to hear the final buzzer going off. I shall let Mr Carpenter, Prominent
Political Commentator, prove me wrong. If it must be done, I would rather
let him apply the cudgel or the dunce’s cap to my person, as he
seems a kindly pedagogue or a student prince, indeed. Even so, my dreams
worried it all night, how it is that Augustine, had he to do it in these
parts – bring off a church plus deep musings – would have
been defeated by the climate, the sublime trumped by the ridiculous;
or that a flotilla of ski bunnies on Owl’s Head just do not cut
it as a sufficiently distracting and sinful spectacle, no, not like
the goodtime girls of ancient Milan.